Prince: Starting in a narrow niche creates local minimums that hinder growth
Matthew Prince · Harry debates Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince: "Should startups target niche markets?" · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Oct 24, 2023 · at 14:24
Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare, argues against the consensus VC advice that startups should optimize for tight, early niches.
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“Where it runs a risk is if you start, start to say, you know, we've got to do X. First of all, you'll attract people that think X is, even though you say the journey is much longer that they'll think that that's the end state. And then secondly, it might be that you start to optimize for that end state where you're like, yeah, we're going to have the snowboard wax module and the bindings module, and we're going to focus on those very niche things, which turn out to actually then hamper you in terms of building towards that, that generic larger vision.”
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